Mandela Turns To Mass Protest To Gain Leverage In Negotiations

December 9, 1990|The New York Times

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -- As it maneuvers for advantage before negotiations on the nation`s future, the African National Congress has replaced its former commitment to armed struggle against white minority rule with a strategy of coordinated protest marches, strikes and consumer boycotts.

Alhough protests against apartheid are not new and President F.W. de Klerk has tolerated peaceful dissent since taking office, mass action, as the congress`s policy is called, has become a key point of contention, delaying talks between black and white leaders on a new national constitution.

From the perspective of the congress, giving up mass action as a tactic would mean going into negotiations with far less political clout.

For de Klerk, mass action complicates negotiations because his white electorate would see any concessions as coerced.

Ronnie Bethlehem, an economist who has studied revolutionary change, said that the congress`s call for mass action signals a victory for its hard-line strategists, who did not want to give up the guerrilla option, over its pragmatists, who view negotiations as the best route to a post-apartheid society.

``It is a victory which could assist strategists and racial ideologists against pragmatists on the government`s side also,`` Bethlehem wrote in the financial newspaper Business Day.

At a politically charged funeral last Sunday for a man shot by the police at an unapproved march on Nov. 17, Nelson Mandela said that the congress would not give up mass action.

``We will not trade off our mass struggle for negotiations,`` said Mandela, who is deputy president of the congress. He called for more demonstrations, even if the authorities refused permission, as happened on Nov. 17.

The civil disobedience campaign has sought out flaws in de Klerk`s policies of change. As Mandela keeps pointing out, he and other blacks still cannot vote and many other structures set up to enforce apartheid remain in place.

The congress suspended its armed struggle, adopted in 1961 after nearly half a century of non-violence, at the last full round of talks with the government on Aug. 6.